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TakeBlaster16on Bitcoin is not a store of value

If I zoom your chart out, I could make all the same arguments about 2018. It looks like just another cyclical metric that follows the halvings.

In the year after the 2018 peak, fees approached zero, but in the year after the 2021 peak, they stayed higher. As long as that keeps up and they don't actually go to zero, and people are competing for block space, miners will keep lining up, and the network will be fine.

Halvings matter less as time goes on. I didn't shed any tears for miner incentives when the reward went down by 25, and I won't shed any tears when it goes down by a mere 3.125. Mining was never meant to be profitable beyond BTC's bootstrapping phase. In fact the protocol actively makes difficulty adjustments to keep profitability near zero. Let their profits go down. As long as people are competing for block space, and transaction fees keep coming in, miners will continue competing for their fractions of a percent, and the network will be fine.

TakeBlaster16on Bitcoin is not a store of value

People do hold this viewpoint, and that's why I linked hard data. You can see the fees fluctuating from day to day. On Sep 3, many transactions had 10x the normal fees. On low volume days such as Sep 11, very few transactions had high fees.

You can argue philosophically about whether a chosen narrative makes sense or "should" create demand for block space, but I'm ignoring philosophy and looking at empirical data. Since this is already happening, and has been for the history of the project, it's not a stretch to predict it will continue happening.

If there was no competition for block space, the fee market would look like white noise, like BCH or DOGE: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#DOGE,30d,weight

TakeBlaster16on Bitcoin is not a store of value

But what is the comparative reward you're talking about here?

The world is filled with situations where something with lesser economic value secures something with higher value. That's a sign of efficiency.

My house is worth $250K. But you couldn't capture that much value by breaking in, so I haven't spent $250K on a security system. If I did need another $250K to secure my first $250K investment, it wouldn't be a great investment.

Suppose it only takes $3.5B to attack a $7.3T network. So what? Unless your plan is to burn billions of dollars for funsies, you'll need to capture at least $4B worth of value for that attack to be worth it. You think you can find someone to anonymously make a $4B crypto sale to you, who won't know where to hunt you down when you try to 51% away the transaction after the next block in 10 minutes?

TakeBlaster16on Bitcoin is not a store of value

Competition for limited block space.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,30d,weight

Constant supply and fluctuating demand will lead to times where you must choose between paying low fees and waiting a long time for confirmation, or paying high fees for faster confirmation. If you zoom out all the way, you can see this has played out with every halving so far.

TakeBlaster16on Bitcoin is not a store of value

Every bitcoin fork I've seen forked to make their own change that the main project refused to make. They forked because bitcoin changed too little.

ETC forked because the main project made a change some people disagreed with. They forked because ethereum changed too much.

TakeBlaster16on YouTubePluginReplacement.cpp: YouTube-specific code in WebKit

If you play a lot of SimCity on Windows 3.1, then you upgrade to Windows 95 and SimCity stops working, who are you going to blame?

TakeBlaster16on GTA VI Leak [video]

I noticed that too. I wonder if the creator has ever seen a dime of Rockstar's GTA money. Looks like no[1], but at least there are a few other AAA developers there.

[1]: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Sponsors

TakeBlaster16on Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

Yes. Unfortunate overloaded jargon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

It reduces variation in volume, so you can hear the quiet parts without having your ears blown out by explosions or gunfire

TakeBlaster16on Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

Whenever I'm watching a modern movie, sticking a compressor on the audio is a must. Open VLC settings, search for "compressor". It's programmer UI, but it does exactly what it says.

TakeBlaster16on GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge

Fair enough, I'll defer to your experience. Although if you're power cycling that much, I take it back, maybe I won't buy your cards :)

TakeBlaster16on GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge

How often does the average machine reboot? If it's less often than 24 hours you're still putting the card under less thermal stress than someone who games for a half hour every evening. I'd buy your used GPU over a gamer's used GPU

TakeBlaster16on GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge

Temperature changes outside don't translate to temperature changes on the die. If the cards are running 24/7 there will be no thermal shock to speak of since they are always generating heat.

TakeBlaster16on Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

Don't forget that we're comparing:

1. someone who broke site rules

2. someone who did not break site rules

I advocate group #1 suffering the consequences for their actions. I do not advocate group #2 losing access due to factors outside their control. Not sure why you're getting the two confused.

TakeBlaster16on Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

The platform should ban the user, with an explanation written by a human being explaining what rule they broke. And no, "our shiny new machine learning algorithm flagged your account" doesn't cut it. Arbitration should be an option. I could write a lot more, but hopefully you get the idea.

TakeBlaster16on Ethereum Classic hashrate doubled this month ahead of ETH merge

I agree -- instead of opening with the scornful "False.", he should have opened with "Here are some interesting details about how that transaction is represented in the underlying data structures"

TakeBlaster16on Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

I would claim the total amount you've spent on Nitro since you first made your account. That was an investment into your account and its history, and now it's gone. You sound like a sympathetic plaintiff. You have a shot. Best case, you get an actual human to look at your situation. Worst case, you're out filing fees and end up back where you started.

TakeBlaster16on Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_et_al_Disinterm...

Most couples now meet online. Good luck convincing them all the internet is not real life. And those stats are from 2017. Given a few years of lockdown the trend has surely accelerated.

Discord is how a lot of young people talk these days. If you're banned from Discord, it's not very comforting to hear "you don't need Discord son, in my day we didn't have Discord and we wrote to our pen pals. I'm sure you'll make some new friends."

TakeBlaster16on Ethereum Classic hashrate doubled this month ahead of ETH merge

Your comment made me expect it to be a lot higher than it was. I remember the BCH fork trading at 10-20% of BTC for months and peaking as high as 50%. 2% seems like a more appropriate ratio.

TakeBlaster16on Ethereum Classic hashrate doubled this month ahead of ETH merge

That distinction is overly pedantic. That's like saying, "No, the store didn't refund my payment. Instead, they made a second transaction that returned an equal amount of money to me."

TakeBlaster16on Tornado Cash and bullets

Describing it as a government policy is trivializing things a bit. You could also describe Japanese internment camps or cash-for-kids as a "government policy". Governments absolutely turn against their people. Regularly. If they get their way and privacy is eradicated, things will get far worse. Imagine if in the 1940s you could have written an SQL query to get a list of everyone who had ever done business with somebody who's Japanese. We'd be living in a very different world. But maybe you're fine with that. After all, nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?

TakeBlaster16on DVD Bouncing Logo

My favorite is still The Office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOtuX0jL85Y

TakeBlaster16on Tornado Cash and bullets

It already has turned against us. In the 1800s with the USPS, we had ultimate privacy - nobody could open physical mail without a warrant, under strict legal penalties. In modern times we have the third-party doctrine[1], where the moment bytes leave your network you have "no reasonable expectation of privacy". If you want privacy now, you can never give anyone any data or do business with any third party, including relying on a third party to route your network packets.

Or you can take matters into your own hands, with encryption.

If someone calls me a fool for using HTTPS and encrypted messaging, I'm fine with that.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

TakeBlaster16on Tornado Cash and bullets

> I believe in privacy and free expression. What I don’t believe is that we can make these things out of computers; they come from norms and law, designed and negotiated by and between free people. When we put it in a computer, all we’re doing is asking for someone to formally circumvent it rather than find a legal loophole. In doing so, we transform a process into a permanent state and fundamentally freeze our ability to make progress.

If norms and law were the only tools we had, nobody would have communications privacy. Every large government around the world is constantly battling against privacy. When the government turns against its people, technology can help. The only realistic solution for privacy in today's environment is to "put it in a computer" using encryption. Would you also argue that instead of adopting HTTPS, we should have written a letter to our congressman?

TakeBlaster16on Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic

I solve that by naming my greenfield projects "hotels_old" from the get-go. It makes things easier for the next guy who replaces it.

TakeBlaster16on Intel says one of its 13th Gen CPUs will hit 6GHz out of the box

Many more cores yes, but 100% CPU usage should still be rare. If your game uses 100% of a 24C/32T processor, it will run poorly on a "mere" 8-core CPU, and most of your target audience won't be able to play it. You're right though, these aren't your grandma's single-threaded games anymore.

TakeBlaster16on Intel says one of its 13th Gen CPUs will hit 6GHz out of the box

Just adding to what you said, a 24-core CPU won't get anywhere near peak power usage during gaming. Most games only use a handful of cores. The only way you'll approach it is with parallelizable productivity work like video encoding or compiling code.

TakeBlaster16on Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project

Components of Servo were integrated just fine into Firefox. WebRender is the big one, and iirc many smaller ones too (the css parser maybe? memory hazy)

There's also non-web-related software that uses WebRender, such as Azul. https://azul.rs/

Maybe there aren't integration points at the layer you were hoping for, but that doesn't mean the entire project is "bullshit"

TakeBlaster16on Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project

Servo wasn't funded by donations, it was funded by Mozilla. That single point of failure was their downfall. I'll take 100 monthly donations over one corporate sponsor any day.

TakeBlaster16on Perfecting WebGPU/Dawn native graphics for Zig

I'm not sure why you keep steering the conversation to Rust. It doesn't matter how doomed Rust's Read trait is. Zig is a totally different language. Zig is not bound by the same design tradeoffs. That is why it's possible for Zig to have generic functions in its Reader interface, such as today's `readInt`, or tomorrow's `readAllArrayList`.

TakeBlaster16on Perfecting WebGPU/Dawn native graphics for Zig

If devirtualization does reliably occur then that's probably good enough. I find myself surprised that they would rely on compiler magic for that, it seems to go against the ethos of the language. But in the grand scheme of things, I guess it's a pretty minor cost.